On Monday 11 February 2002 11:01 pm, Rick Moen wrote: > Now, being a professional cynic (i.e., a sysadmin) with a dark sense of > humour, I expect you'd have us believe that Red Hat Software's change of > policy on this point resulted from a sudden stamp of approval from its > legal department, rather than resulting from competitive pressure.
As soon as Trolltech announced their change of licensing Redhat announced that it would have KDE in the next version. However, the next version of KDE was not ready by the time of the next Redhat. I attribute it a simple goof. > I remember hearing these things. Appealing to the "special exception" > clause of GPL v. 2 clause 3 seemed like really reaching, in my view (for > whatever that's worth). The plain facts seem to not support this. I > regard that matter as self-evident. The special exception clause was frequently cited by the other side, so it was examined, and found that the clause was if not vague, at least very confusing. Certainly we all felt that at least Corel LinuxOS, which used Qt as a part of its installation procedure, was entitled to classify Qt as something normally distributed with a major component of the operating system. Some even argued that the final clause "unless that component itself accompanies the executable" applied to Qt since it accompanied KDE on distro CDs. > I must confess I never saw the logic of this one. If the forcing > provision of licences like GPL and MPL have any meaning whatsoever, > it would certainly apply to derivative works like the "K" variants of > prior upstream works by third parties. We did recognize two genuine problems, the notice of which seemed to be swept away in the furor over the general issue. Two KDE apps were identified that had actually been derived from pre-existing GPLd code: kfloppy and kghostscript. Both the authors in question (Linus Torvalds and Aladdin) were contacted with no response. Leaving them out of the next release was seriously considered. > > Second, that "lasting distrust" was unfortunate, but still nothing we > > could have done anything about. > > This is transparently incorrect: The KDE team could have attempted to > secure explicit Qt-linkage permission from all upstream authors. For > reasons of their own, they did not. I certainly will not debate > intentions, but I will point out the fact of what did and did not occur. Okay, let's take the whole situation and turn it on its head as an analogy. Suppose people from KDE announced sometime in the future that Gnome was illegal because it uses Mono, which itself is an implementation of Microsoft's .NET. The Gnome crew examines Gnome and Mono and concludes that the accusation is erroneous. Mono has implemented an API and is not dependent upon any proprietary libraries. The arguments persist. Miguel patiently explains that Mono is under the LGPL so even if the accusations were true it doesn't apply. The protesters point to Gnome, which is GPL not LGPL, and the whole cycle starts over again. Slashdot gets into the act and Gnome developers are publicly slandered. To the Gnome developers, the whole situation is patently ridiculous. But ridiculous or not, a major distribution has refused to ship Gnome, and C/NET is running articles proclaiming the death of Linux. So what do they do? Do they ignore the problem? Ignore the messengers of the problem? Go through the intense hassle of changing the licenses? But fear not! Gnome is let off the hook. Microsoft decided to release .NET under the GPL (see, I told you this was fantasy) and Kirk McKusick grants forgiveness for any BSD code used in Mono. A fictional story to be true, but maybe you can understand a little better the situation KDE found itself in, and why KDE developers aren't stubborn obstinate fools. -- David Johnson ___________________ http://www.usermode.org pgp public key on website -- license-discuss archive is at http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?3
